Cindy Marcolina - Page 29

Every Tuesday night, four volunteers gather in a drab branch of Brightline taking phone calls from strangers facing hardship. Outside, the world is falling apart. As they try to help the callers, they attempt to conceal their anxieties and fears while trying to deal with their own personal catastrophes.

Helen is finally getting the artistic opportunity she's been coveting, while Phil is being dragged down by her own secret. When the painter is pressured to exploit her background and lifestory, she ends up endangering her closest friendship. OPIA Collective explore female understanding, not-so-inadvertent cultural insensitivity, and the importance of listening to each other in the stylish and cutting The Girl With Glitter In Her Eye.

The new year has officially seen the passing of the artistic direction baton from Matthew Parker to Kennedy Bloomer at The Hope Theatre. Opening the decade in style are 6FootStories with their rewriting of everyone's most beloved Prince of Denmark. Hamlet has hired three players to expose Claudius's diabolic plan. We meet them deep in rehearsals when the ghost of Hamlet Sr thunders in (in uproarious fashion, one must add) to request they avenge his death.

It's 1957 in Chicago. Four policemen, Stan, Rosey, Eulee, and Foxy share an office in-between stake-outs in a city slain by the mob and racial segregation. It's difficult, however, to find real themes in Tony Tortora's play among its misogyny, doughnuts, and Elvis. Sophomoric humour, endless conversations about menial and inconsequential matters, and tiresome boys-will-be-boys banter build a largely uninteresting piece of theatre.

Kevin is called to repair a washing machine in the middle of the woods. As he tries to fix it, he grows increasingly uneasy in the presence of the elderly lady who sent out for him. She seems to know a lot about him and the tales she tells him don't quite check out. Julie Tsang debuts an eerie and haunting play that toys with reality and conceals a dark and disturbing secret.

TJ and Max are breaking up. They've been together since their polyamory club back at uni and they've navigated the gap between their relationship and his Jewish family, but it's not working anymore. After a sold-out and critically acclaimed run in Edinburgh this past August, Jew...ish has made its triumphant way down to London filled to brim with delectable cultural jabs and explosive humour.

It was 2015 when Athena Stevens was forced out of a flight to Glasgow due to her disability. Upon the return of her £30,000 wheelchair, she found that the airline company had severely damaged the machine - and they were being most flippant about it. A social media war ensued, and Stevens ended up signing an NDA and settling the case months after being left with no means of autonomous mobility. Scrounger packages this disastrous event in a chirpy yet feeble comedy that becomes the opportunity for her to detail the endless systematic discrimination she faces daily.

Hampstead Theatre opens the new year with a heartwarming but generally forgettable play on their smaller stage. The Tyler Sisters follows three girls as they grow up and find their place in the world from 1990 to 2030. What the audience gets to see of this time frame in the life of women who might not like each other all the time but who are bound by blood is a series of single scenes for each one of the 40 years.

After 40 years of leadership, Jatinder Verma is stepping down as artistic director of Tara Arts in January. After its conception in 1977, he's turned his company from a community project to a prominent presence on the British theatre scene. In recent years, Tara Arts has also become the first (and so far only) BAME-led company with their own theatre building. We had the pleasure to have a chat with Verma, who summed up his groundbreaking journey and took a look at the state of the industry.

Mike Lew's Teenage Dick has just opened at the Donmar Warehouse. The original take on Shakespeare's Richard III relocates the action to an American high school. We talked to Alice Hewkin, who plays Clarissa Duke, about everything it takes to move Shakespeare into Mean Girls territory.

After being in Peter Pan Goes Wrong and The Comedy About a Bank Robbery, Ellie Morris is joining Mischief Theatre once more to star as Sandra in The Play That Goes Wrong.

It's Christmas Eve and Andy (Elliot Levey) is waiting for his daughter Maya (Ellen Robertson) to come back to him. She left home three years prior after they had - according to her father - a silly argument and she hasn't spoken to him since, nor has she replied to his texts. But someone has seen her in a café in Oxford, so Andy feels that she's ready to finally meet him. He's decked the village hall to welcome her back and he's sure she's coming, even though there are no signs of her. Then, Natalie (Amber James) bursts through the door.

A family start their day like any other. A daughter, a younger brother who's still in school, a mum who takes care of everyone and everything, and a dad who often works night-shifts. They don't know that, as they go about their life as normal, their lives are going to be changed forever when police show up on their doorstep. “Death never used to be for the young” says Francesca Amewudah-Rivers in her arresting performance of debbie tucker green's random.

The Park Theatre are doing Christmas a little differently on their smaller stage this year, presenting an adult play that's seasonal only in its wintery setting. Martha, Josie and the Chinese Elvis is an avalanche - and not in a good way.

Jermyn Street Theatre's Christmas shows are always a surprise. After last year's murderous black comedy Burke and Hare, now they're shifting the spotlight on a collection of fascinating vignettes that are, essentially, the definition of one of the internet's favourite words: sonder, which is a?oethe realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your owna??. That's the core concept of One Million Tiny Plays About Britain.

Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol places Ebenezer Scrooge centre-stage, shoving all its female characters to the side in an attempt to paint a deeply unfair and harrowing picture of London's Victorian society. The protagonist has been an immovable presence in theatres around Christmas time from the same year the novella was published, establishing Scrooge as a historically male role. That is, until now.

Things haven't been easy for Dan after his split with his ex-wife Mandy. His best days now all have their daughter Maisie in them, and she's all he talks about. She's six and they're spending the day in London before she's due to go to her friend's birthday party. The unimaginable happens, and the cracks that were there become abysses. Roger Goldsmith's Maisie is the heart-wrenching account of a broken man.

The third offering of the newly opened Immersive LDN has become a festive classic over the years. Alexander Wright's adaptation of A Christmas Carol is known to appear at a different location every year; Scrooge's Parlour has relocated to the lower ground floor of the venue (which is also hosting their other talk of the town - The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street - whose faint noises you can hear in the distance if you pay enough attention).

Following last year's hyper-successful To Jesus, Thanks For Everything, BenDeLaCreme and Jinkx Monsoon are back with their new extravaganza: All I Want For Christmas Is Attention. The show is a drag-tastic alternative Christmas treat.

Comedy trio Sleeping Trees bring Christmas to Battersea Arts Centre with their latest fairy-tale mash-up. After Cinderella and the Beanstalk and Scrooge and the Seven Dwarves, James Dunnell-Smith, Joshua George Smith, and John Woodburn venture into Wonderland in classic Sleeping Trees style. Goldilocks and the Three Musketeers is rambunctious and properly laugh-out-loud funny.